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coondoggie writes "Alcatel-Lucent and Telekom Austria have completed the world's first trial of G.fast, new technology enabling gigabit broadband over existing copper networks. The technology is only intended for distances up to 100 meters or 0.06 miles. But at that distance and less it helps copper keep up with fiber." It works, says the linked article, "by continuously analyzing the noise conditions on copper lines, and then creates a new anti-noise signal to cancel it out, much like noise-canceling headphones."

I hope we never see this. It's a waste of resources - much better to just run fiber (Or ethernet, since we're talking about 100m) those last few meters and allow for easy upgrades in the future without the burden of ancient telephone cables.

Exactly. Why try to get the most out of something that's already bought and paid for when you can get something completely new and force people to either pay nearly usurious rates for slow speeds or go without.

Disagree. This is great for apartment buildings/complexes where running fiber to the buildings isn't the problem. It's running fiber within the buildings (to the individual units) that's expensive. Something like a third of Americans live in apartments, so a system that spans the last few hundred feet in apartments without needing to rewire buildings would definitely be a win.

Agree, the target audience for this are undoubtedly apartment complexes / existing buildings.

I had verizon FIOS in an apartment last year. The fiber came into a utility closet in the basement. The individual apartments were wired up from there using DSL over the existing phone line. Unfortunately, the cap on plans available to apartments in that area was 20mbits, due to the limits of the DSL technology they used. Something like this would allow a fiber provider to offer gigabit internet to an apartment

My building has a 5Gbs fibre connection, I spoke with the teleco service guy when they were out replacing the equipment a couple months ago. The limiting factor now is the fact the building was wired about 12 years ago with Cat 5. Overall I can't complain too much other than when it's bad weather out on the weekend and everyone seems to be home streaming Netflix. Usually it's throttling at the server I'm connected to that is my bottleneck.

My building has a 5Gbs fibre connection, I spoke with the teleco service guy when they were out replacing the equipment a couple months ago. The limiting factor now is the fact the building was wired about 12 years ago with Cat 5.

CAT-5 should get you gigabit ethernet speeds, no problem. If you've got more than 5 people in your building, the 5Gbps fiber connection is, in fact, still the bottleneck. You can oversubscribe a line only so far, before it gets congested.

Although this is kind of true (for good quality CAT5 cables), it needs to be pointed out that the range will be shorter than with CAT5e. You will never be able to get 1Gbps over a 100m long CAT5 cable. If you're lucky, you can get devices to negotiate gigabit speed at slightly over 60m.

You might have range issues if an idiot patched your CAT-5 cables and did too much untwisting, or made similar mistakes. But if a professional installed it, they were tested and certified (by a certifier that cost several thousand dollars) to fully meet CAT-

So you've got some kind of magic sauce that doesn't require new equipment on each side of those new wires you're pulling? That would be pretty impressive. If it's not one kind of new equipment, then its some other kind of new equipment, after all.

Who said this needs the same kind of DSLAM that existing DSL uses? Isn't the reason DSLAMs are expensive because they sit at the central office and can serve hundreds/thousands of customers? You have no idea how expensive one that sits in an apartment building basement serving a hundred customers would cost.

Blindly believing new technologies cost the same as old technologies is... insane.

It won't... It'll need one that's far, far more expensive. Ditto for the modems... What does a new DSL modem cost today? At least $50 or so? Now you've got to upgrade it to this expensive new gigabit DSL technology, and give it a gigabit network interface, and put one in every apartment. I guarantee a new run of CAT-6 cabling in the most difficult case, will cost less than just the price of the modems for each apartment...

Near as I can tell a 48 port DSLAM is about a couple thousand more than 48 port Gigabit ethernet. If you can get 48 apartments rewired for Cat5 for just a couple thousand dollars, you'll have to let me know how, cause that's a pretty impressively cheap cost. Until you know how much this new technology costs, you're just spouting BS, so why don't you just stop embarrassing yourself.

Excellent - on aGigabit switch we all in our appartments become one flat LAN and can access each other neighbours NAS boxes, etc.

Nope. Everyone is free to plug their WiFi APs/Routers into the building ethernet, just as they would into a DSL modem. And "managed" switches allow you to isolate every switch port onto their own VLAN, just as if they were on physically separate switches, so they can't communicate directly with each other. You need a VLAN compatible router upstream, but any $40 home router tha

The fact of the matter is that the ancient cables are still there and if the addition of simple noise-cancelling can increase the copper speed to allow existing infrastructure to carry greater amounts of data, why is it a waste of resources? Ultimately it may be BETTER to run fiber, but it is almost never CHEAPER. This is especially the case in old buildings where ripping out concrete walls is not feasible or drilling through them to run fiber is not cost effective.

I doubt you'll ever hear an argument that you shouldn't run modern cabling no matter what decade we live in - the problem is that the money just isn't there most of the time to do so to replace infrastructure that is existing.

I don't believe the can make it work without significantly different hardware than what is currently available. That means that for most situations, running a new cable would be cheaper than adding costly hardware on both ends.

The noise-cancelling scheme sounds interesting. The hardest part though is figuring out what exactly is noise - so it sounds like they would have to either invert the intended signal to cancel it out on the path to the noise measurement, or they would have to periodically turn the signal off so they can get a clean measure.

My VDSL link from AT&T already does noise measurement. Buried inside of the web page for the magic box on my end, I can see a graph of what portions of its spectrum it is actually using.

Seems to work OK: There is a very neat notch which corresponds with a nearby AM broadcast tower.

Meanwhile, it doesn't have to turn off the entire signal all at once. Just parts of it. One end says "Hey, George, we're going to turn off 1.6MHz and look for noise there," and the other end says "OK Bob. Let's do it."

Well basically when you modulate a carrier (AM is modulating the amplitude of the carrier with the data signal) half the energy ends up in the carrier signal, and the other half gets split up between to sidebands that sit to either side of the carrier on the spectrum. The sidebands are mirror-images of each other.

There's techniques to suppress them (meaning you don't waste half your transmission energy on redundant signal) but broadcast AM/FM radio doesn't utilize it. Other advantages mean a more efficient

There's unpredictable (random) noise and there's predictable noise. You can't do much about random noise except for trying to determine how much of the noise there is in particular frequency bands. But you can work around predictable noise. The general idea is for the telco equipment to run a bundle of connections in sync. Then they can correlate noise going from connection to connection in a bundle. Then they modify signals transmitted to a particular connection to include anti-noise component, that is a n

If you'll read TFA a little more closely than the OP did, you'll find that the noise-canceling thing is NOT how they got the 1G-ish single-pair link to work.

What the noise-canceling thing is about is when you have TWO OR MORE pairs bundled into a single logical link. Then it figures out what the cross-talk between the individual pairs looks like and cancels THAT out. This lets the individual signal pairs run as fast as a lone pair and the total bandwidth of N

Wow, so as long as you're in the same building as Alcatel Lucent, you're all set. You know, I think 802.11ac goes over 1 gigabit/s and reaches 100 meters on a good day. Maybe they should just go with that. I can't wait until fiber puts all these awful DSL companies out of business along with their ancient technology. AT&T really needs to go and TDS is pure evil too. Those are the big 2 around here. Time Warner's fiber backbone and 15 megabit coaxial-based internet for about $38/mo crushes them and yet some people are dumb enough to still go with AT&T and their legendary support and "pay 4x the value for your own modem up front and install it yourself" policy. You can actually get 50 megabit download speeds on a connection for under $100 around here too. Good luck with that, AT&T.

Dude, this isn't going to reach from the cabinet, it'll have to be in a small box at the curb and at that point why bother, just run a piece of glass or plastic and have a network that will work for 25+ years instead of a 5 year stop-gap measure. To put this in perspective we run into 100m limitations within a single building, it often requires carefully planning where to place the IDF(s) to make sure that all drops are within the 100m length limit for ethernet, using this for a last mile solution is stupid

Dude, this isn't going to reach from the cabinet, it'll have to be in a small box at the curb and at that point why bother, just run a piece of glass or plastic and have a network that will work for 25+ years instead of a 5 year stop-gap measure. To put this in perspective we run into 100m limitations within a single building, it often requires carefully planning where to place the IDF(s) to make sure that all drops are within the 100m length limit for ethernet, using this for a last mile solution is stupid.

well do you want to rewire an entire apartment block with ethernet or use this? that's what it pretty much boils down to.

Why do so many comments in this thread assume everyone lives in a single-family home? In an apartment setting, it's huge cost savings to avoid having to rewire that last few hundred feet to the individual units.

Do you think that just because you used the word "proprietary"? I'm not really sure what maintenance cost you're talking about. There's replacing failed gear and... what am I missing? And why do we believe it will be any more maintenance intensive than fiber gear?

The cost of running fiber through an existing apartment building can be huge. In some cases, costs can be high enough that it almost doesn't matter what the ongoing maintenance costs are.

Including horizontal runs, 100 meters probably gets you coverage for most buildings up to 15 stories. Really wide buildings usually have multiple telephone risers and you'd put a converter at the base of every riser. Taller than that really depends on how the existing telephone lines lay out within the building. You could probably put an additional one of these on the 15th floor, within the riser, for many 30 story buildings and be covered up to 30 stories (getting a single fiber line up the riser is no

I estimate my house as being about 500 wire feet from the box, and I'm not even halfway down the block. This is clearly better for apartment blocks, which have their own problems in covering that last 300 feet. One head-end per typical 16-unit block would be just right.

Their secret pricing is super-annoying and theoretically illegal -- how can you sign a contract without knowing what the rate will be when the promotion ends??? Ridiculous. It's just fodder for a class action lawsuit that will yield $5 coupons off an HBO subscription... but I digress.

I ditched TimeWarner back when Code Red was making the rounds on Windows boxes and they shut off inbound port 80. I complained and several support people told me they considered web hosting "an enterprise service" and if I want

Their approach is exactly the same as "Fiber to the Building." In FttB, you get a fiber, well, to the building and plug that into a router/DSLAM. Then you patch in the lines of that building into the DSLAM. The last 100m is usually VDSL, which is about 150 Mbps symmetrical. ALU simply updated that to be 1 Gbps.

You can't compare DSL to Wifi because wired connections are typically more reliable than wireless (not even discussing security concerns here) and less prone to noise and generate less radio waves

With the help of vectoring, G.fast also works over multiple copper lines at the same time. Vectoring already improves the performance of VDSL2 to 100Mbps over existing copper connections at up to 400 meters by removing crosstalk interference.

OK, so, 100 Mbps at the scale of a block is the real point here. Well, 100 Mbps would be a huge upgrade from my current cable speeds.

To me, 1 Gb at 100 yards sounds like the answer to a backwards question: "how close

At that point you might as well just run the last drop and pay much less for the needed equipment. A fiber modem plus a router with good ol' Cat 6/1000 BaseT will definitely be cheaper than said fiber modem plus DSLAM plus a DSL modem per customer.

100 metres as the crow files, maybe... but within 100m of cabling, which often doesn't follow the most efficient path? Heck, my house is 10m from a VDSL-enabled telecoms cabinet but I happen to know that my house is actually connected to one that's 80m away (as the crow flies) and that there's about 150m of cable between it and my phone socket.

Basically no-one would get to see that 1Gb since, as TFA states, they managed to get 800Mb/s over 100m over a single brand-new cable and got 500Mb/s over an older sin

My uncle was classified as a "First Responder", so according to some or other Homeland Security policy he's federally mandated to have always-on high speed internet access in his home.

There's nothing but state parks and corn fields around his property for probably five miles in any direction. Cable TV isn't even available in the nearest town, which has a population of a few hundred people.

So Verizon bought a 5m x 5x plot of cornfield directly across the street from his house and built a ti

The point is to make the best use of the likely-decades-old "telephone wire" going from the "pole," "telephone box" (for underground wires), or in some cases, "neighborhood fiber box" to the customer's "internet box" (e.g. DSL modem).

This wire is typically no better than "CAT-3" and frequently far worse, electrically speaking. If it's older than a few decades, it's probably chosen for low cost and voice-grade capability. It may also be run close enough to other wiring that it will pick up noise that is to

1Gb @100m doesn't require Cat6, only Cat5, 10Gb @100m requires Cat6A (Cat6 isn't used in any official standard, there's an annex that calls it out for distances to 55m but it was never adopted and real world testing shows a drop off in reliability around 37m)

I'm running on 10/1 cable modem in Central Florida. I can't get DSL at the house - it's not available for any price.

Lightning strikes blew up a bunch of landline phone connections in the neighborhood recently, including mine. I saw the tech working on the repair at my box, which is two doors down from me, about 150 feet from my house. I took him a bottle of cold water because I wanted to get a look at the inside of the box. Chatted with him for a few minutes while he was swapping cards and drinking the

I work for a univerity that just overhauled our DSL system with VDSL2. One 24-port DSLAM (VDSL2 with ADSL2+ fallback) costs us $4K......without any educational pricing. We are getting stable 20/5 connections within 5000 feet. And our copper plant is 40+ years old!!!

The phone companies have long since proven they aren't going to make any further substantial investment in their copper networks, and are simply determined to milk them for as long as possible. They are in fact actively trying to shed their copper networks and go wireless, which has less regulation and higher profit margins.

The odds of AT&T/Verizon making a huge investment in technology that will be lucky to last a couple of years (fiber scales to 10 Gb fairly simply, and cable can probably get close with future revisions of DOCSIS), in a domain they are actively withdrawing from, is pretty much zero.

I read somewhere that British Telecom has a stock market value that is lower than the scrap value of the copper cables it owns. I suspect many other companies are in a similar position, and it shows why they aren't that keen to install new copper cables.

Yes and the analysis was completely wrong. The amount of copper BT owns is a lot less than they claimed as they miscounted it, and a good deal of it is copper clad steel as copper does not have sufficient strength to be strung from a pole to the house.

The last Olympics needed ~6-7Mbps for 720p, ~8-10Mbps for 1080p so if you had two people in your house who wanted to watch different sports you'd very tight at 720p and SOL at 1080p. Those streams were also pretty blocky, the realtime compressors probably could have used 2-3x the bandwidth to make things smoother.

As someone with an ISP in the DSL game. WTF? So Gigabit at 100 meters? Isn't this really just Gigabit Ethernet over a single pair? And really, who is within 100 Meters of their DSLAM. That would cover maybe four homes.

Considering DSL's promises, 100 Mb/s at 100m would be very lucky (and a lot more expensive than Gigabit ethernet, which is dirt cheap).

The only practical application this has is in fiber to the Curb/Building scenarios, where Fiber is run to a local, central location and then distributed via some other interface. Using DSL would theoretically allow for existing wiring to be used, but that sounds like major trouble in the making. It's much easier to just run fiber to the customer's premises and give them a fi

When FIOS came to my neighborhood, most people cheered. I didn't. Not because I didn't want the higher speeds, but because I was concerned about the bigger picture. The baby bells (mine being Verizon) were ordered by the courts to share their copper with competing companies. My understanding is that they were under no obligation to share their fiber. As a result, they've been ripping out copper everywhere they can to replace it with fiber.

I'm assuming Verizon was your ILEC. Even if you had 8 DSL providers, they all used Verizon copper and either leased Verizon lines, or resold Verizon services. So they all had to deal with Verizon. In my case, Qwest, now Centurylink is the ILEC. They hate to share, they make it nearly impossible charge exorbitant fees, and their local techs flat out blackmail and lie to us on repair issues. So we are doing more and more fiber. We still have to fight the power company for pole space, but once on we are

I work with this kind of equipment. The problem isn't the last 100 feet... we've got tech that will do 100mb @ 30,000 feet relighably. If we could get that to people they'd be thrilled. The problem is the trunks leading to the DSAs. They cost upwards of a million dollars a pop to install, which is barely cost effective in city centers... but get out in rural areas where cable companies don't even bother to serve and you have as few as 12 people off a remote. Sorry, but that's only going to get 2 T1s feeding it if they're lucky. Gigabit speeds to and from equipment fed by a 3mb trunk is useless.

The real problem with broadband is the link between the CO and the remote. This goes for DSL and Cable. solve that problem and rural broadband will explode. Cable doesn't even have facilities in those areas so it would have to be over phone copper. Get gigabit speeds on 10+ miles of unshielded copper pairs... that's the goal. Good luck.

Over 100m, Gigabit over copper is already trivially possible. My computer has it built-in, so has anything you've bought in the last few years.

The problem of local connections such as 100m is solved. We're there. It's not a problem. Even a community project that threw Cat6a round the village could do a half-decent job of it at Gigabit speeds over even longer distances.

The problem is the link back to some Internet-connected point, as always. As you say, it's pointless (and quite easy

Over 100m, Gigabit over copper is already trivially possible. My computer has it built-in, so has anything you've bought in the last few years.

The problem of local connections such as 100m is solved. We're there.

This is just stupid. Yes, gigabit ethernet works over CAT-6 data cabling. But guess what? Phone lines AREN'T CAT-6 data. Phone lines are commonly CAT-1 voice. Unshielded, untwisted, etc. If you're super-lucky, some of your phone lines MIGHT be CAT-3 voice, but that's also NOT THE SAME THING AS

No. I'm not. My point is that Gigabit Ethernet over copper is not anywhere close to "state of the art", and hasn't been for a long time - given the fact that even the cheapest of netbooks comes with a Gigabit Ethernet port capable of similar things. Hell, 10G is buyable today if you know where to look, and 40G is on the way. Yes, it's over twisted pairs, but if you can do 40G over twisted pairs, it's because of the technique and the error correction methods - NOT THE CABLE. The cable helps - obviously

if you can do 40G over twisted pairs, it's because of the technique and the error correction methods - NOT THE CABLE.

This is massively, totally, completely, and utterly untrue. It seems to be at the heart of why everything you've said is wrong, and as I said before: "stupid".

You can go down to your nearest tool store and buy phone line by the foot (commonly "CAT-3 voice"). Get about 100m of the stuff, and crimp some RJ45 connectors on the thing, Hook it up between two computers with GbE NICs, and try sen

There's a ton of people on VDSL2 that get between 5-7Mb. Usually in the 2500-3000 meter range. It would be interesting to see how much of a boost these technologies could lend. Getting 30-50 Mb with a simple DSLAM and Modem swap would be game changer.